stop looking at those as “features of the keyboard and mouse that I purchased”

Seriously.

Maybe I’m an old timer but my idea of extra features on a mouse or keyboard are simply more inputs: more mouse buttons or wheels, more keys on a keyboard (like media keys). At most that just requires additional hardware, but nothing my OS can’t handle on its own.

And then to answer your question I don’t think it has much to do with the sport itself.

To think of another example, I’ve seen a lot more violent anger in living rooms triggered by a video game than a sporting event.

Most people don’t look while typing, especially things with muscle memory like passwords, when using a physical keyboard. And a zoom call doesn’t convey facial data in three dimensions. The unique nature of the virtual keyboard, plus the three dimensional avatar, makes this new attack more feasible.

Sounds like what they already did: as soon as the virtual keyboard pops up the eye movement isn’t transmitted as part of the avatar.

Ok so most monitors sold today support DDC/CI controls for at least brightness, and some support controlling color profiles over the DDC/CI interface.

If you get some kind of external ambient light sensor and plug it into a USB port, you might be able to configure a script that controls the brightness of the monitor based on ambient light, without buying a new monitor.

In addition to the stone/clay based works that you might be thinking of, I find certain metalworking sculptures to be interesting, too. Alexander Calder made a bunch of red steel sculptures, almost architectural art, in addition to things like dynamic mobiles. Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman” is an interesting one, too.

There are small metal sculptures, too. From little trinkets made from wire, to welded metal parts, to elaborate chandeliers, these all involve artistic creativity in manipulating materials in a three dimensional space, and it’s a skillset that I admire and respect (and do not have any, myself).

Weight distribution and jiggle control is something I can’t relate to though

It’s not hard. Put on a really heavy backpack and leave the straps super loose, and go try to move around, maybe a few athletic moves that involve changing speed or direction. Compare to a tight backpack with a waistband and shoulder straps properly strapped to your body, and try to move around again. The straps help control the extra motion so that you’re in better control.

Or run around in shoes 5 sizes too big. Or go for a run with your arms loose and intentionally left limp, swinging around like pendulums.

The whole world has a million examples of why providing bracing and support makes for more efficient and comfortable movement.

Some electric BMWs do the same on the literal automobile, too. It’s an EV that sounds like a high performance ICE both inside and outside the car.

Yeah, sounds like a phone call recording app that is allowed to operate on the App Store under the condition that the recording is loudly announced.

Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?

This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.

A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).

So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver’s show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle’s Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.

So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.

Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000’s showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.

Yes, software that is in a package manager is similarly easy on a Mac. There’s an app store, which can be used to install the dependencies for homebrew (which is a good package manager for most of the stuff that Linux package managers maintain, including building stuff from source). Going outside of a package manager is relatively easy (but needs to be enabled, as the defaults basically discourage users from installing software not verified by Apple), but that method of software installation still beats running .exe/.msi installers downloaded from the internet, beats running random shell scripts, probably beats downloading docker containers and flatpaks, and is not that far removed from installing from the AUR or something like pip/conda: you still need to know what you’re doing, and you have to trust the source/maintainer. None of that is unique to any operating system, except those that simply don’t allow you to install software not reviewed/approved by the manufacturer (Apple mobile devices, Android devices by default).

High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.

And I haven’t played around with Asahi yet, but it’ll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple’s fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.

I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install.

It just includes as a dependency the Mac command line developer tools, which can be installed pretty easily from what I remember.

And what I like is that it’s a normal Unix style shell, with almost all the utilities you’d expect.

you have to drag the icon in to install things.

I mean that’s about 100 times better than Windows’ default of running an installer that isn’t easily reversible.

I sync if I have a good Internet connection, like from my hotel room or whatever, by VPNing into my home network where my NAS is. There are distributed DNS type solutions for a lot of the big NAS brands, where they’ll let you access your data through their service, but I never set that up because I already have a VPN. So my NAS and firewall are configured not to allow outside connections to that device.

But if I haven’t synced laptop to NAS yet, then copies exist on both my camera SD cards (redundant double SD card) and my laptop.

3-2-1 backup is important. I’ve been burned with lost files before, so I now make sure they’re available in multiple places.

I also encrypt everything. My laptops can’t be unlocked by anyone except myself: Apple Filevault on my Apple laptop, LVM on LUKS on my Linux laptop. If something happens to me, my laptops must be wiped completely to be useable as a used device.

My NAS keeps my backups of all my documents and media (and as a hobbyist photographer, I have over a terabyte of photos and videos I’ve taken). It’s encrypted, but I’ve written the key down on paper and put it in my physical documents. If something happens to me, someone who goes through my physical documents will have access to my digital files.

I pay a cloud service (Backblaze) for cloud backups. I trust the encryption and key management to not actually give the service provider any access to my files.

The tech companies literally drive around cars looking at what wifi beacons they see, and then store the locations where those BSSIDs were seen.

I’m still a skeptic of the Nova system into the 4 categories (1: unprocessed or minimally processed, 2: processed ingredients, 3: processed foods, 4: ultra processed foods), because it’s simultaneously an oversimplification and a complication. It’s an oversimplification because the idea of processing itself is such a broad category of things one can do to food, that it isn’t itself all that informative, and it’s a complication in that experts struggle to classify certain foods as actual prepared dishes being eaten (homemade or otherwise).

So the line drawing between regular processed food and ultraprocessed is a bit counterintuitive, and a bit inconsistent between studies. Guided by the definitions, experts struggle to place unsweetened yogurt into Nova 1 (minimally processed), 2 (processed culinary ingredients), 3 (processed food) or 4 (ultra processed food). As it turns out, experts aren’t very consistent in classifying the foods, which introduces inconsistency in the studies that are performed investigating the differences. Bread, cheese, and pickles in particular are a challenge.

And if the whole premise is that practical nutrition is more than just a list of ingredients, then you have to handle the fact that merely mixing ingredients in your own kitchen might make for a food that’s more than a sum of its parts. Adding salt and oil catapults pretty much any dish to category 3, so does that mean my salad becomes a processed food when I season it? Doesn’t that still make it different than French fries (category 3 if I make them myself, probably, unless you count refined oil as category 4 ultra processed, at which point my salad should probably be ultra processed too)? At that point, how useful is the category?

So even someone like me, who does believe that nutrition is so much more than linear relationships between ingredients and nutrients, and is wary of global food conglomerates, isn’t ready to run into the arms of the Nova system. I see that as a fundamentally flawed solution to what I agree is a problem.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here’s a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn’t correct

I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).

Harry Frankfurt’s influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.

When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.

When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.

But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.

The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.